This is something ECMAScript 6 is rumored to support (along with other pink fairies and unicorns), once it gets published and adopted. But in the meantime, intrepid JavaScript programmers are left out in the dark. Unless you really need this to preserve sanity and are willing to resort to unconventional methods.

Yes, it's as horrible as it looks. And yes, it's sometimes convenient. Naturally for a couple of 3-line strings I probably wouldn't bother. But when you need to cleanly embed multiple long multi-line strings (templating, anyone?) in your source code, I find this pretty useful.